When your back-burner becomes a wildfire.

February is the month of Valentines and Galentines and heart candies and love-haters alike. And if you're an entrepreneur... February also means tax time.

Thus our topic, which comes for every business owner at one time or another in their career- when your back-burner becomes a wildfire.

It's easy to let that happen at this time of year. All of a sudden you start seeing emails or reminders or voicemails about official documents, and that makes even the most organized small business man or woman get a little itchy. Time to catch up the books, itemize all the expenses on your credit card, look back an eternity ago to last January and remember who all you've worked with, and how much and oh dear God why are my expenses on coffee so high? It's a season when my friend Greg becomes my accountant Greg, and our email exchanges no longer include niceties about his new baby and instead have questions I can't answer without investigatory work.

In short- tax time seems the perfect time for things to "slip off your list" and into the pile of forgotten things. Here's a few new ways to look at tackling those kindling seasons/items that can lead to full on wildfires.

1) Be a Hot Shot. In actual wildfire fighting, the "Hot Shots" arrive on the scene first. They work on the hottest parts of the fire removing things that could make the spread worse. This sounds exactly like where we should start when it comes to our personal and business wildfires. Stop the spread by drawing boundary lines around work that could get really ugly if it got forgotten. Do these items first each day or work session, to be sure they don’t get consumed.

2) Be a Crew Boss. Crew bosses are in charge of- you guessed it- delegating the right people to fight fires in the right places. For you, becoming a Crew Boss means delegating tasks to your main support, even if it's well within your ability to do them. In your business, you hopefully have those support people already established. For example, outsource more to your assistant, your contracted helpers (like FIVE:thirty), or your accounting team, legal advisors, or even ask a friend or relative to help in other ways during this extra busy season.

3) Start a Back Fire. In a recent conversation we had, my father enlightened me about "back fires" as a way to fight fires. You actually head in the direction the fire is likely to spread, and burn the area there first, so there's no fuel for the fire to consume. In essence, this is a brilliant concept for dealing with your own out of control to do list. Look at where the issues are likely to spread, and start your own back fire. Will you miss a deadline for an important client? Reach out to them to notify that you're aware you're approaching a deadline you'll miss, but you'll make it right with X, Y, and Z. It's far better for a client to be aware ahead of time that they're about to "get burnt", and by getting ahead of the issue, you're consuming some potential anger before they even get wind of the problem.

4) Allow the fire to burn. Alas- fires are a natural part of our ecosystem, and sometimes there's nothing to be done except allow it to burn. If you're in a season where all the above "steps" have been taken and the fire is still out of control, it seems the only thing left is to let it burn. In the future, this might be a helpful case study on what went wrong, how you can improve in the future, and how you can help others when you spot the same signs of smoke. Occasionally, life throws wildfires our way, and there's no amount of logistics, steps, or life hacks to put it out. We simply have to let time be time, and work on staying grounded with faith or friends until it passes.

So there you have it, a very poor education on fighting fires, and ways you can incorporate their methods into your madness. What seasons find you scrambling to get all the things done? What ways have you found to tackle these items while keeping your sanity?

And as always, if you need a team in your corner to help with your digital needs, consider us the Crew to your Crew Boss!